WASHINGTON — The Secret Service's acting director told lawmakers on Tuesday that he considered it indefensible that the roof used by the gunman in the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump was unsecured, faulting local law enforcement for not circulating urgent information ahead of the shooting and for not adequately protecting the scene.
He also testified that he recently visited the shooting site and said, “What I saw made me ashamed." He said that the shooting amounted to a “failure on multiple levels," including a failure of imagination.
The testimony was the most detailed catalogue to date by the Secret Service of law enforcement failings and miscommunications, with Ronald Rowe accepting blame for his own agency's mistakes while also repeatedly lacing into local law enforcement for not sharing information that a gunman, later identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, had been spotted on a roof near the rally site in the minutes before the July 13 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“We assumed that the state and locals had it,” Rowe said. “We made an assumption that there was going to be uniformed presence out there, that there would be sufficient eyes to cover that, that there was going to be counter-sniper teams” in the building from whose roof Crooks fired shots, less than 150 yards (135 meters) from the rally stage where Trump was speaking.
“And I can assure you,” Rowe added, "that we’re not going to make that mistake again.”
Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, was struck in the ear by a bullet or a bullet fragment in the assassination attempt, one rallygoer was killed and two others were injured before the gunman was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper.
The blunt and at times emotional testimony Tuesday, featuring combative exchanges with lawmakers, ensured that an already simmering blame game between federal and local authorities will continue. It also suggested that Rowe, with ready and detailed answers, was determined to strike a different posture than that of his predecessor, Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after facing intense criticism from lawmakers from both major political parties after responses that were seen as evasive and lacking in specifics.
Much of Tuesday's hearing before the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees focused on what Rowe suggested was inadequate information received by Secret Service personnel in the hour before the shooting, including that Crooks had been spotted on the roof.
Local law enforcement officers had spotted a suspicious-looking man pacing near the metal detectors and circulated but ultimately lost track of Crooks before he scaled the roof of a building at AGR International Inc. Shortly before the shooting, a local officer climbed up to the roof to investigate. Crooks turned and pointed his rifle at the officer, who retreated.
“No information regarding a weapon on a roof was ever passed to our personnel,” Rowe said. At another point, he noted, ”It is troubling to me that we did not get that information as quickly as we should have. We didn’t know that there was this incident going on.”
But Rowe's willingness to assign blame to local law enforcement opened him up to harsh criticism from Senate Republicans, who saw him as failing to take responsibility.
“Isn’t it the fact that the former president was shot, that a good American is dead, that other Americans were critically wounded — isn’t that enough mission failure for you to say to the person who decided that that building should not be the security perimeter, probably ought to be stepped down?” said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican.
Rowe, raising his voice, responded that he has “lost sleep over this for the last 17 days” and that he would not be rushed “to judgment” by Congress, but he assured lawmakers that “people will be held accountable.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said if something like this happened in the military, “a lot of people would be fired. And if a lot of people are not fired, the system failed yet again.”
He added: “Nothing’s going to change until somebody loses their job.”
The FBI, meanwhile, disclosed new details about Crooks, with Deputy Director Paul Abbate saying a social media account believed to be associated with the gunman suspected in the assassination attempt espoused political violence and included antisemitic and anti-immigrant sentiment. The posts were from the 2019 and 2020 timeframe, when Crooks would have been in high school.
On Monday, the FBI revealed that Crooks had looked online for information about mass shootings, power plants, improvised explosive devices and the May assassination attempt of the Slovakian prime minister.
The FBI also said that Trump has agreed to be interviewed by agents as a crime victim. Trump, who appeared at events in the days after the shooting with a bandage on his right ear, said he expects the interview to take place on Thursday.
At Cheatle's hearing last week, she said the Secret Service had “failed” in its mission to protect Trump. She called the attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades and vowed to “move heaven and earth” to get to the bottom of what went wrong and make sure there’s no repeat of it.
Cheatle acknowledged that the Secret Service was told about a suspicious person two to five times before the shooting at the rally. She also revealed that the roof from which Crooks opened fire had been identified as a potential vulnerability days before the rally.
In a Monday night interview on Fox News Channel, Trump defended the Secret Service agents who protected him from the shooting but said that someone should have been on the roof with Crooks and that there should have been better communication with local police.
“They didn’t speak to each other,” he said.
He praised the sniper who killed Crooks with what he said was an amazing shot but noted: “It would have been good if it was nine seconds sooner.”
